FM : We know who abducted
her, but not where she is.
We believe that she is in an area not far from the Iberian Peninsula
and from the north of Africa. And we have a quite certain idea of who
she is with.

Q
:With
whom?FM : That is a question
that I cannot answer because
we are locating all the proof beyond irrefutability in order to
present them to the authorities and proceed with the arrests.

Q
: Does
this mean then that this is a kidnapping and that she
is alive?

FM : I have always
made it clear publicly that the child is alive. I cannot enter my
office every morning and talk to my people without telling them the
girl is alive. I have to believe in this 100%, because I know how to
look for people that are alive, not dead people.

Q
: But,
have you got any proof?

FM : No, we have none.
We have evidence of the child’s movements after her abduction. We
know that the girl was alive the day after her disappearance.

Q
: And
then what happened? Did the girl and her supposed abductor
leave Portugal?

FM : There is no
certainty that the girl left
Portugal. However, there is certainty that the abductors left
Portugal in a determined moment.

Q
: So,
the fact that she is alive is more a hope than a
reality?FM : We speak of
certainty because we know which group could have her or could have
proceeded to abduct her to sell her on to a third party.

Q
: Do you completely discard the economic motive, a kidnapping
carried out by professionals?

FM :
Obviously. This is a middle class British family, without economic
resources. A professional kidnapper would already have made some move
with Maddie. They would have returned her or they would have left
her. One of the things that enables us to believe she is alive is
that the girl would be worth more each day for them.

Q
: What
are we talking about? A sect, a criminal group, paedophiles?FM : In principal, paedophiles.

Q
: Could
they be Spanish?

FM : I don’t think so.

Q
: Why
did the Algarve police sustain that Madeleine was dead and blame
her parents?FM : Well, a few days ago, the same
Portuguese police expressed
that the McCanns had nothing to do with it and that they were sure
that a paedophile had entered the room and killed her.

Q
: Do
you also believe that they are innocent?

FM : You only have to be with them
for 5 minutes to know they had nothing to do with it.

Q
: How
would you explain the traces of blood that were supposedly found in
the room and the hairs that were found in the boot of
the car?

FM : There is no proof
up until now of traces of blood in the room. And apparently, in the
boot there is a trace of a micro-hair that could be Maddie’s. But
that would be completely logical and normal as it was the family’s
car.

Q
: Do
you think she will be back with her parents before
Christmas?

FM : I hope so.

Q
: When
will we know the dénouement?FM : We have a six month contract
to find that. We have always said that we want to comply with our
contract by finding the little girl.

Q
: What
is your opinion of the media circus the case has
generated?

FM : I think it is very good that the
serious press and the
journalists who know about these issues talk and write what they
want, because they are well-documented. What seems bad to me is that
the tabloid press does it.

Q
: How
many cases similar to that of Madeleine are there in
Spain?

FM : There are no statistics about
that, but many, hundreds every year.

Q
: Is
this the most difficult case you have faced?

FM : It is the case with the most
pressure, by the press and
by my own family. When I get home, my children ask me “Have you
found Maddie yet, Dad?”

Grisé par un salaire de 50 mille livres par mois, plus les frais, Francisco Marco, qui fut sélectionné en raison de son hypothèse, la connection pédophile, oublia le ressort de toute enquête privée, le secret, et céda publiquement à la tentation de réunir l'enfant à sa famille pour Noël. Il fit produire un croquis de l'homme sans visage signalé par Jane TB, coupable idéal car il fournissait à tout le monde un alibi, mais sans crédibilité selon la PJ. La journaliste Christine Toomey le rencontra dans les nouvelles installations que l'argent coulant à flots lui permit d'occuper sur l'un des boulevards les plus en vue de la capitale catalane. When a
taxi driver drops me off at Metodo’s new premises, he tilts his finger
against the tip of his nose and says “pijo” – meaning stuck-up or
snobbish. Pointing to the restaurant on the ground floor, he says:
“That’s where people who like to show off go – so others can see their
Rolex watches and designer clothes.” It is in his office on the
second floor that Marco has agreed to meet me, the first British
journalist, he says, to whom he has ever granted an interview. When I
point out that he was filmed by a Panorama documentary crew in November
claiming he was “very, very close to finding the kidnapper” of
Madeleine, he corrects himself: “Well, apart from that.” Marco will tell
me later how who he has spoken to, and what he has or has not said, has
been misunderstood.

But first I must wait, taking a seat at a
long, highly polished boardroom table surrounded by pristine
white-leather chairs. At one end of the room, discreetly lit shelves
display an impressive collection of vintage box cameras and binoculars.
Stacked against the walls are modern paintings waiting to be hung. It
feels more like an art gallery than the hub of one of the most frantic
manhunts of modern times. There is no discernible ringing of
telephones; little sign of activity of any kind, other than a woman
searching for a lead to take a pet poodle for a walk and the occasional
to-ing and fro-ing of workmen putting finishing touches to the sleek
remodelling of the office complex. It is not clear whether this
is where the hotlines for any information about Madeleine are answered.
Opposite the boardroom is an open-plan area of around half a dozen
cubicles, equipped with banks of phones and computers. Most are empty
when I arrive; admittedly it is lunch time. But I cannot ask about this.

“We won’t answer any questions about Maddie. Maddie is off
limits – is that understood?” Marco’s cousin Jose Luis, another of the
agency’s employees, warns me sternly. Catching me eyeing the
setup, he is quick to explain that Metodo 3, or M-3, bought the premises
earlier last year. Though I say nothing, I get the distinct impression
he wants to make it clear that this was before M-3 persuaded those
involved in decisions regarding the £1m Find Madeleine Fund – partially
made up of donations from the public and partly from business backers
such as Brian Kennedy – to sign a six-figure, six-month contract with
the firm, whose financial fortunes now seem assured by the worldwide
publicity they’ve since received. “All the remodelling work took
months, so we only moved in on December 14,” he says, hesitating
slightly before adding: “Moving is better at Christmas.” The implication
that this was a quiet period for M-3 is strange, as it was exactly the
time Marco is reported to have said his agency was “hoping, God willing”
that Madeleine would be imminently reunited with her family. Marco has
since denied he said this.

I cannot ask him to clarify what he
did say, or whether talking about an ongoing investigation is
potentially detrimental. Instead, I am left to discuss the matter with a
handful of other private detective agencies in Barcelona, the
private-eye capital of Spain. What they tell me is disturbing. I
expect a certain amount of rivalry, and some of what they say about M-3
could be dismissed as jealous gossip. But they claim otherwise. They
say there is nothing they would like more than to see M-3 succeed in
solving the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance. But they worry that
M-3’s inflated claims of progress in the case is making a laughing stock
of the rest of them. References to Inspector Clouseau cut deep. They
are proud that, unlike their UK counterparts, Spanish private detectives
have to be vetted and licensed. They must also have a specialised
university degree in private investigation. More importantly, in a
profession where discretion is critical, they worry about the effect of
such public declarations on the progress of any investigation. It is in
the days following reports that the Find Madeleine Fund is considering
sacking M-3 that I talk to Marco – though of course I cannot discuss
this with him.

Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for Kate and
Gerry McCann, Madeleine’s parents, says he believes M-3 “put themselves
forward” for the task, as did a number of other companies. Just a week
after the four-year-old’s disappearance from the McCanns’ holiday
apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve on May 3 last year, Portuguese
police had announced that official searches were being wound down.
Initially, the British security company Control Risks Group, a firm
founded by former SAS men, was called on for advice. Mitchell confirms
that the company is still “assisting in an advisory capacity”, but he
says that the reason the Spanish detective agency was hired was
because of Portugal’s “language and cultural connection” with Spain. “If
we’d had big-booted Brits or, God forbid, Americans, we’d have had
doors slammed in our face, and it’s quite likely we could have been
charged with hindering the investigation, as technically it’s illegal in
Portugal to undertake a secondary investigation,” Mitchell explains.
“But because it’s Metodo 3, [Alipio] Ribeiro [national director of
Portugal’s Policia Judiciara] is turning a blind eye.” Portuguese police
are reported to dismiss M-3 as “small fry”. (1)

Mitchell says the
decision to hire M-3 on a six-month contract from September was taken
“collectively” by Gerry McCann, and the family’s lawyers and backers, on
the grounds that the agency had the manpower, profile and resources to
work in several countries. “You can argue now whether it was the right
decision or not,” he says, referring to widespread reports that M-3 will
find its contract terminated in March – if it hasn’t been already – and
not just because the Find Madeleine Fund is dwindling. “But
operationally Metodo 3 are good on the ground,” he insists. It
was M-3, for instance, who recently commissioned a police artist to draw
a sketch of the man they believe could be involved in Madeleine’s
disappearance, despite Portuguese-police claims that the sketch had “no
credibility”. Clearly, the McCanns are desperate to keep
Madeleine’s disappearance in the public eye. And the release of
photofits by M-3 will help to achieve this. The McCanns insist, however,
that they are not engaged in a bidding war for interviews with American
television.

But when 35-year-old Marco finally breezes into his
company boardroom and throws himself into a chair opposite me, I do not
get the impression that the prospect of losing the contract that has
brought his company such notoriety is playing much on his mind. Marco
slaps on the table a 144-page pre-prepared dossier of articles written
in the Spanish press about himself and M-3. He goes on to list some of
those in the city he says I have already been speaking to about his
company. Had my movements been monitored? If so, why would a private
detective agency be interested in this at a time when they were supposed
to be tirelessly searching for the most famous missing child in the
world? This confounds me until, after talking to Marco for half an hour,
I conclude that what motivates him – as much as, if not more than, his
professed desire to present Madeleine with the doll he boasts he carries
around in his briefcase to hand to her when he finds her – is a sense
of self-regard, self-publicity and money.

In
most of the many pictures of himself included in the material he hands
me, Marco looks a little nerdy. He wears the same serious expression,
slightly askew glasses and suit and tie in nearly all of them. But when
we meet he has a more debonair look. He is wearing a black polo-neck
jumper underneath a sports jacket, sharper, and better-adjusted
half-rimmed glasses, and a fringe that looks as though it has been
blow-dried. It is as if his image of how a suave private eye should be
has finally been realised. In contrast to the other private eyes
I meet, however, Marco is anything but relaxed. While most of them sit
back easily in their chairs, trying to size me up, Marco leans towards
me as we talk. He presses his hands hard on the table, almost in a
prayer position, to emphasise a point, and has an intense, slightly
unnerving stare. He seems eager to please. He summons a female
assistant on several occasions to bring me material, including a book he
has recently written, to illustrate what he is talking about. Even when
I make it clear this is not necessary – aware that these distractions
eat into the time we have to talk – he insists, partly showing off.

When
I ask about his background, Marco summons her to photocopy the first
pages of his doctoral thesis on private investigation: he has a master’s
degree and a PhD in penal law. He gets strangely agitated when she
can’t find it, telling her to carry on looking, then mutters that he
will have to look for it himself. (2) Eventually he starts to reminisce
about his youth. As a teenager, Marco says, he was so keen to become a
private detective that he would get up at 5am to follow people on his
scooter and record their movements before starting and after finishing
his studies. His mother, Maria “Marita” Fernandez Lado, founded M-3 in
1986, when he was a boy, and he used to help out in the agency every
holiday. I hear several different accounts of what Marita was
doing before she set up the agency. According to her son, she was
working on a fashion magazine when, by chance, through Marco and his
brother’s boyhood love of sailing, she met and became friends with a
private detective. “From that moment, she decided she wanted to create
her own detective agency, and wanted it to be a big company with big
cases, a real business. She wanted to change the public image of a small
private detective concerned with infidelities,” Marco says.

In
Spain, private eyes are sometimes called huelebraguetas – “fly [zip]
sniffers”. One of the reasons Barcelona has always been the home of so
many of them, Marco explains, is that Catalonia – traditionally one of
the wealthiest regions in Spain – had many rich families wanting to
safeguard their inheritance. So parents would employ “fly sniffers” to
check out the backgrounds of the people their sons or daughters wanted
to marry. M-3 took a different track. It started specialising in
investigating financial swindles, industrial espionage and insurance
fraud. His mother was the first private detective, Marco says, to
provide video evidence used in court to unmask an insurance fraudster:
she filmed a man reading who had claimed to be blind. Marco also speaks
about how in the early 1990s his mother had helped advise the Barcelona
police, who were setting up a new department dedicated to investigating
gambling and the welfare of children. He says his mother advised them on
how to track adolescents who had run away from home, helping them to
trace 15 or 16 of them at that time. (It is when I try to bring the
interview back to this subject, to see if these were the children the
agency has talked about finding in the past, that the interview grinds
to a halt.)

But the agency almost came to grief early on, when
police raided its offices, and Marco, his mother, father and brother
were arrested and briefly jailed in 1995 on charges of phone-tapping and
attempting to sell taped conversations. They were never prosecuted, as
it was clear that the police had entrapped them. Their big break
came nearly 10 years later, when M-3 was credited with tracking down
one of Spain’s most-infamous spies, Francisco Paesa, a notorious arms
dealer and double agent also known as “El Zorro” (The Fox) and “the man
with a thousand faces”. Paesa fled Spain after being charged with
money-laundering. His family claimed he died in Thailand in 1998 and
arranged for Gregorian masses to be sung for his soul for a month at a
Cistercian monastery in northern Spain. Acting for a client who claimed
to have been defrauded by Paesa’s niece, M-3 traced the fugitive to
Luxembourg. At the behest of the Spanish national newspaper El Mundo,
the agency then traced him to Paris. Paesa remains on the run, however.

“This
was just one of our great achievements. Our biggest successes have
never been made public,” boasts Marco. “If you speak to other detectives
in Spain, I don’t think they will speak very highly of us because they
are envious. But as far as other detectives around the world are
concerned, we are the biggest, the most famous; the ones who work well.”
Again in collaboration with El Mundo, and again by following an
illegal money trail, M-3 last year tracked down the daughter of the
wanted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim to a farm in Chile. “This was
pro-bono work, and we only do it when we have time,” says Marco. The
hard-pressed detective did have time just before Christmas, however, to
launch a book he had co-written with a Spanish journalist. The book
claims that clients of M-3 sacked directors of a charity involved in
sponsoring children in the Third World, were victims of a plot to
discredit them by people associated with a Spanish branch of Oxfam who
were jealous that the public was giving them large donations. The sacked
directors are still under investigation for fraud.

It is
perhaps because Marco has spent so much time collaborating with
journalists in the past that he feels so comfortable talking to the
press – the Spanish press, at least – about his investigation into
Madeleine McCann. In November he gave two lengthy interviews about the
case, one to El Mundo and another to a Barcelona newspaper, La
Vanguardia. In the interview with El Mundo, Marco talks
touchingly about how his six-year-old son asks him the same question
every evening when he kisses him goodnight: “Papa, have you found
Maddie?” Because the little boy is learning to read, the article
continues, he knows that his father is “the most famous detective in the
world”. But why, the journalist Juan Carlos de la Cal asks,
would anyone in the UK, “the country of Sherlock Holmes, with all its
cold-war spies and one of the most reliable secret services in the
world”, have chosen M-3 to help? “Because we were the only ones who
proposed a coherent hypothesis about the disappearance of their
daughter,” Marco replies, explaining that M-3’s “principal line of
enquiry” at that time – the article was published on November 25 – was
“paedophiles”. He talks about how he “cried with rage” when he
investigated on the internet how paedophiles operate.

Apart from
these comments made by Marco, little concrete is known about how M-3
has been conducting its investigation. In the same article, Marco’s
mother says the agency, which she claims has located 23 missing children
in the past, has “20 or so” people working exclusively on the McCann
case. M-3 was said at that time to be receiving an average of 100 calls a
day “from the four quarters of the globe”, and to have half a dozen
translators answering them in different languages. The agency has
distributed posters worldwide bearing Madeleine’s picture with the
telephone number of a dedicated hotline it has set up to receive
tip-offs. The interview was carried out just after Marco returned from a
two-week trip to Morocco, a country he describes as being known for
child-trafficking and a “perfect” place to hide a stolen child. The
north receives Spanish TV, he says, but the rest of Morocco knows
nothing about the affair. Fanfaronnades

Yet in an interview published three
weeks earlier in the newspaper La Vanguardia, Marco claimed that the
agency had “around 40 people, here and in Morocco” working on the case,
on the hypothesis that the child was smuggled out of Portugal, via the
Spanish port of Tarifa, to Morocco, “where a blonde girl like Madeleine
would be considered a status symbol”. At that time he said he didn’t
want to think about paedophilia being involved. Asked how often his
agency contacts the McCanns with updates, Marco replies “daily”. He adds
that the fee that M-3 is charging for its services is not high. He says
that it is “symbolic”. In the same article – accompanied by a
photograph of Marco holding a Sherlock Holmes-style hat – he says with
absolute certainty that Madeleine is alive. “If I didn’t think she was
alive, I wouldn’t be looking for her!” At first he states categorically
that he will find her before M-3’s six-month contract runs out in March.
But also in the same article the journalist explains that Marco
proposes taking him out to dinner if he does not find the missing
four-year-old before April 30. Unless all such statements are
“misunderstandings”, Marco is in danger of leaving everyone with hopes
that are not fulfilled.

When I start to touch on these themes –
the claim, for instance, that M-3 traces around 300 missing people a
year – Marco is quick to clarify. He says that, of the 1,000 or so
investigations his agency undertakes every year, “between 100 and 200
involve English people who owe money and have fled England for Spain;
the same with Germans, etcetera, etcetera”. This makes it sound as if
much of the agency’s work is little more than aiding bailiffs or
debt-collecting, though I do not believe this to be the case. But when I
ask him to elaborate on the 23 missing children his mother is reported
to have said the agency has located in the past, Marco eases himself
away from the table for the first time, tilting far back in his chair.
He cannot talk about that on the grounds of confidentiality, he says.
Shortly after this, his cousin Jose Luis, who has sat mostly silent
until now, calls time on the interview with a chopping motion of his
hand.

As I leave M-3’s office I pass another door discreetly
announcing it is that of a private Swiss bank. As I take a seat in the
restaurant downstairs for lunch, I notice Marco’s father, Francisco
Marco Puyuelo, sitting close by. I nod at him and smile. He does not
smile back. I have heard unsettling reports about Puyuelo. He is
rather menacing-looking, and I feel uncomfortable as he sits staring at
me, slowly spooning chocolate ice cream into his mouth. It
is easy to feel a little paranoid in Barcelona. Nearly every quarter
seems to have its own private detective agency. Offices are prominently
advertised; on the short ride in from the airport I pass four.
The city’s yellow-pages directory has six sides of listings. According
to Catalonia’s College of Private Detectives, the professional
association to which private detectives working in the region are
obliged to belong, of the estimated 2,900 licensed private eyes in Spain
– around 1,500 of them actively working – 370 are in Catalonia, mostly
Barcelona. The city has traditionally had a prestigious record
for private investigation. One of Spain’s most well-known detectives,
Eugenio Velez-Troya, was based in Barcelona, where he helped set up the
first university course in private investigation, covering subjects such
as civil and criminal law, forensic analysis and psychology. One
of the largest private detective agencies in Spain, Grupo Winterman,
founded by Jose Maria Vilamajo more than 30 years ago, is based in
Barcelona, though the company now has 10 offices in different cities
with a staff of around 150. Vilamajo is the only detective prepared to
talk on the record; the others prefer to remain anonymous for fear of
professional reprisal. He talks about how Barcelona came to have so many
private detectives, pointing out that competition in the field is now
so intense that it is pushing individual agencies to “specialise”. Vilamajo
is the only private detective apart from Marco to receive me in a
spacious company boardroom, which, it strikes me, might be the model on
which Metodo 3, anticipating rapid expansion, is basing its new office
setup. I meet the other private eyes either in bars or in their
more modest premises, with more cloak-and-dagger decor, though nearly
all have an impressive array of certificates praising their work. One
has the theme music from the film The Godfather as a mobile-phone ring
tone. All talk of the “different way” M-3 has of operating from
other agencies in the city. Most of what they say I have no way of
substantiating. Traditionally, they say, M-3 has wined and dined clients
more than others, sometimes holding grand “round-table” suppers to
which it invites important figures in the community. One ageing
sleuth slides across the table a Spanish newspaper article entitled
“Detectives with marketing” , in case I might have missed it. A short
piece referring to the book Marco recently co-wrote about the alleged
charity conspiracy, it makes the point that the book “is another step in
the direction of incorporating marketing into the business of private
investigation”.

When I ask what’s wrong with a business
marketing itself, my question elicits a long sigh. Suddenly I can see
that underlying much of the rancour M-3’s rivals feel towards it is a
sense that they are not “old-school gumshoes” working in the shadows.
One of their criticisms of Marco is that “he doesn’t know much about the
street. He’s good at theory. He’s like a manager, always dressed up in a
suit and tie”. So he has a team of others to do the legwork, I
argue. Another long sigh. “Not as many as he claims,” comes the
response. On this point, all those I speak to agree. None believes M-3’s
claims that it has 40 people working on the hunt for Madeleine, since
the maximum number M-3 employs in its Barcelona office, they believe, is
a dozen, with another few in its Madrid branch.

But again, I point out, it could have any number of operatives working for it in other countries, namely Portugal and Morocco. My
comment draws a weary smile. Metodo 3 company records for the six years
up to 2005 appear to show a decline in the number of permanent
employees listed – from 26 in 1999 to just 12 in 2005 – although there
could be some accounting explanation for this. Perhaps the most
worrying of the detectives’ concerns is the consistent complaint that
M-3 is using its involvement in the search for Madeleine to raise its
profile and that Marco’s statements about how close he is to finding the
child could be seriously prejudicing attempts to find out the truth.
“If the agency fails to solve the mystery of Madeleine’s disappearance,
that failure will be forgotten in a few years,” said one. “But M-3 will
be famous and, ultimately, that is what they want.”

“They are
making us look ridiculous,” says another detective. “The English are
looking at us and laughing and we are very worried, very upset about it.
They [M-3] are denigrating the ethics of our profession.” To
seek guidance on how private detectives are expected to behave, I visit
the president of Catalonia’s College of Private Detectives: Jose Maria
Fernandez Abril. After making the point that he is unable to speak about
any individual member of his professional association, he proceeds to
carefully read me a statement that begins: “Following the media impact
of affairs in which detectives belonging to the college are involved…”
It clearly echoes the concerns that others I have spoken to voice about
the conduct of Metodo 3. “No general conclusions should be drawn
about the profession from the actions of any individual,” Abril reads,
before helpfully explaining that this means: “You can’t go around saying
you are the best in the world, implying that everyone else is somehow
worse.” More importantly, there are repeated references to how
members are obliged to comply with the college’s strict code of conduct,
which includes: not stating with certainty the result of an
investigation and not revealing information about an investigation
without agreeing it first with the client. In other words, if
M-3 was to argue that announcing just when it believed it would find
Madeleine would help its investigation, the announcement should have
been cleared with the McCanns. Given the deep dismay Gerry McCann is
reported to have expressed over Marco’s comments about how close the
agency was to finding his daughter’s kidnappers and about her being
reunited with her family for Christmas, it seems unlikely any agreement
over such statements was ever made. (3) Pourtant, dans les interviews de mai 2008, Kate MC défendit les propos de Francisco Marco en soulignant qu'il avait seulement dit "espérer".

As I leave, Abril informs me
that the college has in recent years organised an annual “Night of the
Detectives” supper. This year it will be held in March. He invites me to
attend. At the supper, various prizes are presented. Among them is one
for the fiction author they believe has contributed most to the public
understanding of investigative work. This year they have awarded the
prize to Dan Brown, author of the worldwide bestseller The Da Vinci
Code. They are a little hurt that he has not replied to, or even
acknowledged, their invitation to attend.All this could be almost funny
if I were not constantly aware that the reason I have come to Barcelona
is because an exhausted little girl enjoying a family holiday went to
sleep in pink pyjamas alongside her twin brother and sister on the night
of May 3 last year, then disappeared. The anguish and desperation of
her parents account for the Spanish detective-agency’s lucrative
contract. The boasting and apparent false hopes fed to them by Marco
could yet prove to be his downfall.

Both authors
worked for Método 3 on the Madeleine case, Antonio mostly in Morocco,
and Julián in Portugal. As Julián speaks English he was used as an
interpreter in meetings with the McCanns, and so privy to inside
information. The authors claim that right from the start
Francisco Marco, the head of Método 3, saw the investigation as an
opportunity to make a lot of money out of Madeleine. He consistently
lied about the number of detectives working on the case, claiming there
were 20 when at most there were 4. Consequently the claims for expenses,
travel costs etc were fraudulently based on 20 detectives. FM also saw
the case as an excellent way of getting free publicity for the agency,
and courted the Spanish and international media to that end. The hotline
was also fraudulent, as calls were diverted to the Método 3 office and
answered by detectives with poor language skills, rather than being
handled by employees who spoke a wide range of languages, as claimed.

The
first contact was when Julián phoned the Kennedys in the first week of
December 2013 and spoke to Brian's son Patrick to try to organise a
meeting (a long and friendly conversation). Because of financial
problems (presumably Julián's) and Christmas commitments they decided to
postpone the meeting until January. He then sent an email to
Brian Kennedy on 8th January 2014 in which he explained why he wanted to
meet him, to show proof that they had been defrauded and work out a
strategy as to what to do next. He got a confirmation that the email was
received but no reply. After sending the email twice more, he got an
out of office message saying that BK was in America and enquiries should
be addressed to Ed Smethurst.

It then took Julián four emails to
get Ed Smethurst's email, and when he wrote got an answer that it would
be difficult for them to get involved in a lawsuit against Método 3
because they had to concentrate on looking for Madeleine, or at least
finding out who abducted her. Finding this response hard to
believe, he wrote back to Smethurst in his capacity as a director of the
Find Madeleine fund. In the book he reproduces the email he got in
reply in full:

Dear Julián,I have just had a phone
conference with our advisors. As you know the Metropolitan Police are
now in charge of the investigation. Because of this, the Trust has
agreed that we will not meet or discuss the investigation with any
private detectives whilst the Met's investigation continues. This is why
we can't meet with you.However, if you have any information
that could help the Trust or the investigation, please feel free to send
it by email and it will be gratefully received.

Julián was
alarmed at getting such a cold, distant answer and, disappointed, wrote
another email to the fund, again reproduced in full in the book. The
gist of it is:So although we've said we want to help you uncover
a fraud that you were subjected to, you don't want to meet with us or
help us unmask the agency that stole money that was intended to find
Madeleine McCann, money that was given by the warm-hearted general
public and ended up in the pockets of M3. Please, I need to know if this
is correct, because it's hard to understand your position, so I need to
know for sure if I can count on your cooperation.